Newswatch

Olympic power broker Sheikh Ahmad AlFahad Al-Sabah did try to improperly influence an election for an Asian woman soccer official to join the FIFA Council, sport’s highest court ruled on Monday.

Sheikh Ahmad, who gave up his own FIFA Council seat in 2017 after being implicated in vote-buying by United States federal prosecutors, was alleged by one candidate in the April 2019 soccer election in Asia to have offered her inducements to withdraw.

The Court of Arbitration for Sport said its judges ruled the election was “subject to improper influence.” The court’s statement did not identify the Kuwaiti sheikh.

The judges also decided the Asian Football Confederation failed to protect its own election from gender discrimination.

However, the court denied the request in candidate Mariyam Mohamed’s appeal to have the election annulled or rerun despite broadly agreeing with her arguments.

The inducements “were not effective,” the court said in its statement, because Mohamed “did not withdraw her candidature.”

“In that respect, while the panel found the third-party interference established, it underlined that it did not, in the end, have an effect on the elections,” CAS said.

Mohamed, a soccer official from the Maldives, lost to her opponent from Bangladesh 31-15 in the poll of AFC member federations.

The winner, Mahfuza Akhter Kiron, got a fouryear term representing Asia on the 37-member FIFA Council.